God wants us to appropriate all He offers in his Son, but how? It is tempting to pursue wisdom or peace or healing or a particular gift… but God wants us to have more. He wants us to appropriate Jesus Himself… More than that, He wants us to know his Son. Paul wrote, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” (Philippians 3:11-12)
A. B. Simpson was born in Canada in 1843 and became an early student of God’s Word. He loved to preach, to write hymns, and to encourage Christians to reach out to the neglected people of the world. After moving to New York City, Simpson started the Christian and Missionary Alliance and served the Lord until he died in 1919. Simpson often shared that the turning point in his life came when he realized God intended everything to be about Jesus. This is a paragraph from a writing entitled Himself:
I prayed a long time ago to get sanctified, and sometimes I thought I had it. On one occasion I felt something, and I held on with a desperate grip for fear I should lose it, and kept awake the whole night fearing it would go, and, of course, it went with the next sensation and the next mood.
Of course, I lost it because I did not hold on to Him. I had been taking a little water from the reservoir, when I might have all the time received from Him fullness through the open channels.
I went to meetings and heard people speak of joy. I even thought I had the joy, but I did not keep it because I had not Himself as my joy.
At last He said to me – Oh so tenderly – “My child, just take Me, and let Me be in you the constant supply of all this, Myself.” And when at last I got my eyes off my sanctification, and my experience of it, and just placed them on Christ in me, I found, instead of an experience, the Christ larger than the moment’s need, the Christ that had all I should ever need was given to me at once, and for ever!
And when I thus saw Him, it was such rest; it was all right, and right forever. For I had not only what I could hold that little hour, but also in Him, all that I should need the next and the next and so on, until sometimes I get a glimpse of what it will be a million years afterwards, when we shall “shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of our Father” (Matt 13:43) and have “all the fullness of God.”
So let us ‘take hold’ of Jesus… nothing more and nothing less. And let us believe God’s great mystery and spread his good news.
“I have become [the church's] servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness – the mystery that has been kept for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the saints. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Colossians 1:25-27